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Time to spice up your visualization skills?

Introduction

I love a visualization well done, whether by me or someone else. In fact, I love visualization period. I find there’s always something to learn by looking at an image or animation, and always look for something new and interesting I can learn.

Today I would like to share with readers some of the things I learned, saw, or admired over time.

Where to start? Visualization in Google Earth

Yes, we all know nowadays how to use Google Earth to plan our next vacation, check our old neighbor’s new house, etcetera. But visualization? Yes indeed. Just today I was at a roundtable meeting of Fig Tree members (Fig Tree is an NGO that supports international development projects) and I learned how Google Earth is used by many NGOs for project planning: for a start check the Mercy Corps‘ Rough Google Earth Guide, these map overlay tools, and the official gallery.

Be a generalist and a specialist at the same time

Specialize in one discipline if you can. See what the experts in that field do. For example I am a Geophysicist and do a lot of seismic visualization and interpretation, so I look at what folks like Steve Lynch, or Art Barnes to name a couple, and follow Agile Geoscience blog. Again, keep abreast of the latest technology: Google Earth is increasingly being used in seismic exploration planning and visualization. You can find some examples here and even get some seismic overlays and display them yourself: if you have Google Earth just download this KMZ file and double-click.

I am also always curious about other fields and browse for examples incessantly. I am interested in music, and I was thrilled to find this great review of Music Visualization. I am also interested in Astronomy and Planetary Exploration, and over time I have found some amazing visualizations. This video for instance is a volume rendered animation of the star-forming region L1448 created by Nick Holliman(Durham University) in VolView, an open source volume visualization program.

Looking for ideas?

Here’s an interesting visualization project from IMB: sign up on Many Eyes to not only browse several examples of visualizations but also to upload your own data and outsource the visualization project.

Want to make it your profession?

Read The Data Visualization Beginner’s Toolkit series from Fell in Love with Data blog. This is the introduction to the series. In the first post he reviews books and other resources. In the second post he introduces some rules and more importantly the software tools. There’s a feature interview with Moritz Stefaner on data visualization freelancing:

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Go ahead if you want to use my code, modify it, improve it, for non-commercial AND for commercial use. You are also welcome to download and reuse my media files - unless otherwise stated. With both code and images, please give full and clear credit to Matteo Niccoli as the author and mycarta.wordpress.com as the source.
WordPress bloggers are welcome to reblog my posts. For republishing outside of WordPress or any other request, please e-mail me at: matteo@mycarta.ca